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16 2 SALARIES AND EXPENSES a 00·00·08 30·06·09 a Room 2425, White City 201 Wood Lane, London W12 7TS 020 8008 4228 Editor Andrew Harvey 02-84222 Deputy editors Sally Hillier 02-26877 Cathy Loughran 02-27360 Features editor Clare Bolt 02-27445 Reporters Carla Parks 02-27630 Laura Scarrott 02-84224 Peggy Walker 01-43940 Production editor Claire Barrett 02-27368 Art editor Ken Sinyard 02-84229 Ariel online Andy Walker (editor) 02-84227 Alex Goodey 02-27410 Business co-ordinator Silvana Romana 02-84228 Ariel mail claire.barrett@bbc.co.uk Ariel online expore.gateway.bbc.uk/ariel Guest contributors this week ANDREW GRAYSTONE on an opportunity to turn religious tv into dangerous viewing. Page 10 ROOPA SUCHAK enjoys the glitz, but not the lack of sleep at the marathon Bollywood Oscars. Page 14 BBC Jobs 0370 333 1330 Jobs textphone 028 9032 8478 BBC Jobs John Clarke 02-27143 Room 2120, White City, London W12 7TS Advertise in Ariel Ten Alps Publishing 020 7878 2314 www.bbcarielads.com Printing Garnett Dickinson Group Rotherham 01709 768000 Subscribe to Ariel Six months: £26, £36, £40 Twelve months: £50, £60, £68 (prices for UK, Europe, rest of world respectively) Cheques to: Garnett Dickinson Print, Brookfields Way, Manvers, Wath Upon Dearne, Rotherham S63 5DL Tel 01709 768199 INFORMATION IN AN EMERGENCY Telephone 0800 0688 159 Ceefax Page 159 www.bbc.co.uk/159 Ariel is produced by Internal Communcations for people at the BBC PLEASE RECYCLE YOUR COPY OF ARIEL > ARIEL ONLINE: BBC NEWS AS IT HAPPENS – EXPLORE.GATEWAY.BBC.CO.UK/ARIEL< Not so much the exes, more the take home pay THE BBC FOUND ITSELF SPEARED on the point of the media’s knives last week and shared some of the discomfort that members of parliament have endured recently. Disclosure just isn’t the clean process that Mark Thompson and his advisors might have liked. You can argue that the expenses claims are not especially extravagant for a big media organisation where a certain level of schmoozing of stars, agents and indeed MPs is part of the process of good business. But just as moats, duck houses and packets of biscuits were glorious gifts to press and broadcasters, so Jana Bennett’s stolen handbag, the rescue of Mark Thompson’s family on holiday and his chauffeur’s parking costs were among the colourful examples eagerly seized on by the print, broadcast and online communities to embarrass the BBC. It was a pretty How did you judge the reaction to the Q publication of the salary and expenses details? I think we got on the front foot. We A decided to start living with this new philosophy about being open about the expenses we disclosed. Inevitably there was a day of noise in the press but it’s what the BBC should be doing. Do you think in the light of the disclosures Q the level of expenses will come down? AThe level of expenses has been coming down over a number of years and is already at quite a low level. We have to run the BBC effectively, we should be out there making the case for the BBC and making sure we get the best talent and although I think we should bear down on expenses where we can – the right level for the BBC is not zero. Nothing I’ve read in the papers has made me think we have a problem. I don’t think anyone has been able to stand this up as a scandal. Do people earning such big salaries need Q to claim for so many little things like a coffee and sandwich for discussions with staff. A lot of people would pay that themselves and not claim it back? That’s a matter for individuals. If a A member of staff or a manager takes someone, say a presenter or a journalist, out to lunch and claims for it, that manifestly can be a justifiable expense. So if a £40 or £50 lunch is justifiable then cappuccinos for two in Starbucks are also justifiable. It’s a matter for individuals if they want to claim everything or not. Are you still saying that it’s necessary to Q pay such high salaries to attract decent managers? A I think most people who have friends or family in the rest of the media will know that these salaries in terms of UK media are not in any way exceptional. We pay less than the market. We want to be competitive enough that people will consider joining us and every time we do one of these appointments we lose about half the candidates you might want to attract because of the remuneration – and it’s getting harder because top pay outside the BBC has been growing at such a rate. These levels of pay can look high but in the real world, if you restricted the pay you would restrict the kind of people you could get to work for the BBC. Q A predictable uproar and will soon fade from the headlines but there’s no doubt that public disclosure will have a longer lasting impact. You can’t imagine that all the lunches and celebrations and mutual hospitality will continue at quite the same levels. That’s not to say they were wrong but a lot of people we’ve talked to are amazed that highly paid executives still put in claims for the kind of everyday coffee and chat items they would never dream of claiming back. The levels of executive pay have the potential to cause the BBC problems externally and internally where the pay scale has been met with some incredulity. It doesn’t help the argument that the licence fee should be reserved exclusively for the BBC when it can pay its managers so handsomely. It was against this background that Ariel asked Mark Thompson for his response… ‘The salaries are not exceptional’ Q&A ARIEL IN CONVERSATION WITH MARK THOMPSON There must also be an argument that there are a lot of people within the organisation who could be brought through and promoted? I’m constantly being told there is a danger of a talent drain from the BBC. We know that key talent, especially in areas like entertainment, are constantly in danger of being poached by the rest of the market – and even with internal candidates, the best and the brightest are comparing what they could earn inside and outside the BBC. Nobody is making a decision about working for the BBC because this is where the big bucks are. In the current climate, would it be appropriate Q for the senior community to take a pay cut? AEveryone around the organisation on £60k or more is having a pay freeze. In real terms senior manager pay will go down this year and we’ll look very hard at whether senior managers should be part of a pay review next year. I don’t think we would get the best people to do these important creative and leadership roles if we arbitrarily reduced pay and pretended that we lived in a world without a labour market for top pay. The danger is you would end up with a BBC that is quite inward looking, that can’t get people in from outside and therefore relies on a smaller talent pool and you would end up with a BBC that was no longer a world class broadcaster. Are you concerned that if the public Q thinks salaries are too high you could lose goodwill at a crucial time for the licence fee? The tightrope the BBC has to walk is A between the talented people we need to make this a world class broadcaster, alongside legitimate public concern about what we pay – and you end up with a compromise where you pay less than the market in many areas and more than the public, if taken in isolation, would want. But if you ask the public if the BBC should have the best people running its journalism or its operations they’d say yes. Q The government seems convinced that money must be found to support an alternative regional tv news and it thinks taking some from the licence fee is best We don’t believe the case has been made A that you need cash for the preservation of regional news. Even if you accept that point, there are a number of possible sources – for instance spectrum tax – that the BBC and other broadcasters are being expected to pay for digital television after 2014. That money could be used to create a fund to support an alternative source of regional news. I believe that a division of the licence fee, which at the outset can sound very innocent and public spirited, is a dangerous path to take. Do you think a collision with the Q government is inevitable It is not something I or the BBC Trust A or the executive are seeking. There is so much in the Digital Britain report we can support. However we will continue to make the argument about why we think top slicing is not in the interests of the BBC and is not in the best interest of the public and is not something the public will support – and that’s our case and we will continue to make it. It will be interesting to see how that develops over the summer.
a 30·06·09 SALARIES AND EXPENSES NEwS 3 This was just the start Last week’s publication of salary and expenses details was just the start of a process of disclosure that Mark Thompson says will make the BBC more open than any other public organisation. He announced the new transparency in a speech in Manchester that will be followed, most probably in September, with further details on the website regarding the salaries and expense claims of an additional 50 senior people. They will be selected according to a combination of seniority, salary and responsibility for spending. In the autumn, the precise salary of the 100 people below executive board level will be published with the present bands of £30k removed. Their expense claims will be published quarterly, line by line. Thompson says that some details with be held back to preserve an individual’s security ‘but embarrassment is not an excuse’ for avoiding openness. The BBC is sticking to its line on payments paid to top entertainers and presenters, saying it will publish overall payment figures but not the amounts individuals receive. How average pay works out Average pay at the BBC in 2007-08 was approximately £43,000. This is calculated by dividing the public service payroll by the number of public service employees. The average comes down to £31,000 when senior managers are taken out of the reckoning, which means that the salaries of the top 250 or so people at the BBC raise the overall average by £12,000. Mark Thompson told the Today programme that average pay was ‘much higher’ at the BBC than in the public sector overall. Salaries paid to people in BBC Worldwide and World Service are not included in the averages. All that parking Mark Thompson has explained the ten pages of car parking charges, some for as little as 90p, which appear on his list of expenses claims. These were costs paid by his chauffeur, usually on a company card, while on official business. The BBC also pays the congestion charge for his official car while he pays the costs of personal motoring. The dg was reimbursed £2236.90 for flying his family home (Al Italia economy) last year after he had to cut short their holiday when he was called back to London to deal with the Ross/Brand phone calls saga. THE 50 HIGHEST PAID PEOPLE AT THE BBC SENIoR bbC mANAgERS’ SALARIES Mark Thompson director general £647k Mark Byford deputy director general £459k Jana Bennett director BBC Vision £406k Zarin Patel chief financial officer £ 3 2 9 k John Smith chief executive, BBC Worldwide £380k Caroline Thomson chief operating officer £328k Tim Davie director, A&M £314k £370k-400k Peter Salmon director, BBC North £310k-340k Alan Yentob creative director* Erik Huggers director, FM&T Helen Boaden director, BBC News Sharon Baylay director, MC&A £280k-£310k Bal Samra director, BBC Vision operations Pat Loughrey former director, nations and regions Richard Sambrook director, Global News £250k-£280k Dominic Coles chief operating officer, journalism Jay Hunt controller, BBC One Roly Keating director of archive content £220k-250k Danny Cohen controller, BBC Three Ed Williams director of communications Janice Hadlow controller, BBC Two John Linwood chief technology officer, FM&T John Yorke controller, drama production Julie Gardner head, ind drama commissioning Nicholas Kroll director, BBC Trust Richard Deverell controller, BBC Children’s Roger Mosey director, London 2012 £190k-£220k Andy Parfitt controller, R1/1Xtra/Asian Network Andy Griffee editorial director, Project W1 Anne Morrison controller, network production Chris Day group financial controller Chris Kane head of corporate real estate Dorothy Prior controller production resources Emma Swain head of in-house commissioning, BBC Vision Graham Ellis controller production, A&M John Vickerman director HR shared services, BBC People Liam Keelan controller, daytime television Mark Damazer controller, Radio 4 and Radio 7 Mike Goodie director employee relations and people strategy More revelations in the next list The next most interesting thing about who’s on the list of top people is who’s not on it. The newest director, Lucy Adams who’s in charge at BBC People, arrived on June 1 and so misses the May 7 timeline. Elsewhere, journalism is not particularly well represented with the three national directors for Wales, Scotland and Ed Williams, director of communications, joined the BBC from Reuters Nicholas Eldred group general counsel; secretary, Operations Group Peter Horrocks director, World Service Peter White chief executive Switchover Help Scheme Richard Klein controller, BBC Four Robert Shennan controller, Radio 2 and 6 Music Roger Wright controller, R3 and director BBC Proms Stephen Mitchell head of multimedia programmes, BBC News Tom Archer controller, factual production, BBC Vision £160k-£190k George Entwistle controller, knowledge commissioning, BBC Vision Jon Beazley controller, entertainment production, BBC Vision Nicolas Brown director, drama production, BBC Vision ◆ Basic salaries at May 7, 2009. This list does not include members of BBC Worldwide, Post Production and Studios, BBC World, UKTV * Alan Yentob is part time creative director so does not receive this full salary. He is paid separately as presenter of Imagine Peter Salmon, director BBC North, will head the BBC’s second biggest operation Helen Boaden, leader of the 6000 members of news Jay Hunt, controller BBC One returned after a short spell at Five John Vickerman, director of HR shared services, manages Capita contract and policy simplification Northern Ireland missing the cut. The same goes for the editors of the news operation at TVC. The controller of Radio 5 Live, the sports and news station currently on a good run of form, is also outside the 50. Come September, there will be keen interest to see who is included in the next group of 50 No apologies for ‘amazing’ Glastonbury ‘It wAS PREtty bIjou,’ jokes Paul Rodgers, 6 Music editor. ‘We had a very small staff and one of our guys was walking with a limp by the end.’ The teams who worked around the clock at Glastonbury certainly weren’t feeling bloated, despite what the critics claimed. The Daily Mail and the Times noted that the corporation had sent 407 members of staff to the festival, ‘almost as many as it flew out to film Beijing’, while Tory MP Philip Davies fell back on the line that the numbers were ‘yet another example of how the BBC is bloated’. The BBC has been quick with its riposte, pointing out that as the official broadcast partner of Glastonbury it is responsible for all of the broadcast infrastructure and transmission from the festival: 130 of the 407 were short-term contractors employed to rig and de-rig the site and provide security. That left 125 members of staff and around 150 freelancers – a mix of presenters, producers, directors, camera and sound crews, lighting and design, web producers, vt engineers and runners, including 18 staff dedicated to the interactive content. Between them they produced a staggering 111 hours of television coverage, 60 hours of radio output, 600 website pages and 57 hours of video, in addition to running the BBC’s Introducing stage. And their efforts haven’t gone unnoticed – 16m people tuned in to watch the television coverage. AN EXASPERAtED director general told Ariel that the tabloid criticism of the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage was ‘Pavlovian’. ‘What is the right number? Do the critics know?’ he said. ‘Glastonbury has become an amazing part of our summer at the BBC. Our people are working around the clock to bring a great occasion to the British public.’ This year 6 Music provided the BBC’s live coverage for the first time. ‘It’s been a bit of a stretch, but we had a defining weekend,’ said editor Rodgers. He defended the spread of coverage across the BBC’s tv and radio stations. ‘It was amicably shared out,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of things to fit in and there’s so much cultural activity going on in one place – it doesn’t easily fit in one portfolio.’ Clare Bolt Neil Young: still rockin in the free world
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